Advancements in computing technology, including increased amounts of memory, hard drive space, processing capabilities, etc. available in computing devices, have allowed an incredible number of documents to be generated and retained. Such documents are often generated and retained on personal computing devices such as desktop computers, laptop computers, multimedia players, mobile phones, etc. An issue that arises when a large number of documents exist on a computing device is how to organize such documents so that a particular document can be located quickly by a user. Oftentimes, users will create a hierarchy of folders and store certain documents particular folders in the hierarchy. While this organizational scheme may be effective for a relatively small number of documents over a relatively short amount of time, as the number of documents increases and an amount of time increases from when folders were initially created, users may be unable to remember where certain documents have been stored.
To allow users to more efficiently organize and locate documents, applications have been developed that automatically organize documents based at least in part upon metadata pertaining to the documents. For example, a document may be an image captured by a digital camera and transferred to a personal computer. An image viewing application can organize such images based upon dates that the images were created. Thus, for instance, a folder may be automatically created pertaining to a particular day, and all images captured by the digital camera on that day can be automatically placed in such folder. While such a scheme helps in connection with automatically organizing documents, users may have difficulty remembering precise dates that documents were created.
Another example mechanism that facilitates organizing documents on a computing device is enabling tagging of documents with user-defined metadata. Thus, for instance, if a document is an image that was captured when a user was on vacation at a particular location, the user can assign a tag to the image that indicates dates of the vacation, name of the location, etc. Thereafter, to locate a particular image, the user can search using a query that corresponds to metadata assigned to one or more documents, and the search can be undertaken over the metadata assigned to the documents. Generally, this can be an effective mechanism for a particular user in connection with organizing documents. However, if such documents are transferred for utilization or review by another user, such metadata may have little meaning to the other user.